purely individuals. Our loyalties, if ‘loyalty’ has any meaning left, are to various and ever-varying configurations of personalities. Has this fact wholly escaped you?”
“Well, uh, well, no,” Patulcius floundered, “but—”
“I can offer you nothing in the way of work,” Theta-En-nea finished. “I doubt anyone anywhere can, any longer. However, if you care to stay a while in Oxford, we can talk. I think we might learn something from each other.”
For whatever help that may be to you afterward, she left unsaid.
8
The world abides. I am still I, bone, blood, and flesh, aware of the induction unit that enwraps me but also of walls and their views across the outside, silvery-hued turf, a fountain arcing in fractals, an enormous shell of diamond within which, I have heard, grows a new kind of comet-mining spacecraft, flashes in the sky as a weather control module implants energy, the allness exterior to me. So quiet is this room that I hear my breath go in and out, my pulse, the rustle of hair when my head moves on the couch. What happens to me is a waxing of interior cognizance until soon it is the outside that is the ghost.
I descend into myself. My whole past opens to my ranging. Again I am a slave, a fugitive, a servant, a leader, a companion; again I love and lose, bear and bury. I lie on a sunlit hillside with my man, the clover smell and buzz of bees are sweet to know, we watch a butterfly pass; it is gone, these five hundred years.
There are blurs, there are gaps. I am not sure whether lichen grew on yonder stone. Yes, quantum randomness gathers its tax—but slowly, and I can renew what matters, even as my body renews itself. A neuropeptide links to the receptor on a nerve cell...
Come, The thought is not mine. It becomes mine. I am conducted, I conduct myself, onward and inward.
Thus far went my training. Today I am ready for oneness.
I do not go into the network. Nothing moves but those fields, mathematical functions, that the world perceives as forces, particles, light, itself. In a sense the network enters me. Or it unfolds before me, as I before it.
My guide takes form. No shape walks beside me, no hand holds mine. Nonetheless I am conscious of the body, though it may lie halfway around the planet, hi the way that I am conscious of my own. His person is tall, slender, blue-eyed. His personality is blithe and sensuous. You were once Flora (I learn of you), he thinks to me. Then I will be Faunas. He would like us to meet afterward for purposes of exploration. That is the merest ripple through an intelligence born of a brain made flawless. He has the gift of sympathy too, that he may help a neophyte such as me begin to partake.
Timidly, then warily, then ardently I mesh the flow of my identity with his. Thereby I more and more know the entire linkage. I have studied an abstraction. Today I am in and of the reality. Currents go like billows, cresting, troughing, weaving new waves. From them spring figures many-patterned and crystalline as snowfiakes, brilliancies that expand outward through multiple dimensions, shift, nicker, dance in eternal change; and this is the language and the music that speak to me. Afar, immanent, core, outermost, the great computer sustains the matrices of our beings, vivifies them, sends them on then- orbits andTsummons them home. Yet it is at our behest. We are what happens, the oneness, the god.
We. Minds reach forth, touch, join. Here is Phyllis, my human teacher, who first accompanied me along the fringes. I have her self-image, small, dark, long-haired, though in dim wise because she is not thinking about her body. I recognize the gentleness, patience, toughness. Suddenly I can share her interest in tactile harmonics and microgravity laser polo. Her warmth embraces me.
And here is Nils. Even without image or name, I would know that laughter. We are good friends, we have sometimes been lovers. Did you truly never want to be more than that, Nils? Do immortality and invulnerability breed fear of permanence?
You belong to an age that is dead, my dear. You must free yourself of it. We will aid you.
How is it I feel cold, here where space is a fiction and time an inconstant? No, this is not really you, Nils. I haven’t sensed your thoughts before, but surely they would not float free of all feeling tike these.
You are right. I am not in the network. This is my double, the downloaded configuration of my mind. Whenever I rejoin it, I grow the richer by what it has known while I was away. (Increasingly I have found you dull and shallow. I had not the heart to tell you so, then, but now there is no more hiding-)
By his emotion I know that Faunus—glands, nerves, tb’e whole animal heritage—is physically linked like me. Be of good cheer, Flora. You have boundless choices. Evolve with us.
Another mind comes to the forefront of me. It too is bodiless, but forever. A certain kindliness glows yet (because memories of loss and sorrow do, no longer felt yet still, in shadow fashion, understood?) to make it bid me Behold.
He was a physicist who dreamed of discoveries. Already the unification had been achieved, the grand equation written. Defiant, he.cherished his hopes. He knew full well how unlikely it was that any law remained unknown, that any experiment would ever again give a result for which the synthesis could not account. Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible, though. And if he never stumbled on some basic new phenomenon, the interplay of the quanta must keep casting forth surprises for him to quest through.
The computer system perfected itself. Nothing he had found with his subtlest and most powerful instrumentation was beyond its analysis. Everything he might find in his laboratories, it could predict beforehand, in ultimate detail. His science had reached the end of its search.
Idle hedonism repelled him. He set a device to shut down his body while it programmed the patterns that were bis mind into the system.
Are you happy?
Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments. Time is mine to do with as I will. For it may take an hour to plan Earth’s weathers a year ahead, with the measures necessary to contain chaos; it may take a day to design an extension of the Web or compute the fate of a galaxy ten billion light-years hence on which it has accumulated sufficient data; but each bit of information processed is an event, and to me those hours are as a million years or more. Afterward I may descend to the pace of human thought and learn what went on while I was transfigured. On this I meditate. It is small but interesting. Grow into augmentation, Flora, and at last you will share splendor, promises the shade.
From Phyllis I understand that few desire such a destiny. They will stay organic, however mutable. Linkage is pleasure, enlightenment, challenge. Joined, we realize what we cannot realize singly, about each other and about the cosmos. We bring our revelations back and refashion them in our separate ways. New arts, skills, philosophies, joys, newnesses for which no old name exists, spring into being. Thus “do we enlarge and fulfill ourselves.
Come. Try. Surrender what you are to find what you are.
I merge into Phyllis, Faunus, phantom Nils. We are a self that never was before. I am slave who won to freedom, teacher and sportswoman, photosculptor and sybarite, dilettante mathematician and serious athlete. We will need many unions to ease the conflicts and create a single creature—
A whirl, a wheeling, a measure in the dance. Others have been with us. I withdraw and merge again. I am servant who won to a sort of queenship, gilled inhabitant of the sea, professional imaginer, artificial personality designed by the whole in conjunction with the computer—They fly together, they lose themselves, the hive mind Mazes and thunders—
No!
Let me out!—and I flee down endless echoful corridors. Fear howls at my heels. It is myself that pursues.
She was alone, save for the medical machine that watched over her. For a while she merely shuddered. The breath sawed in her throat. Her sweat stank.
Terror faded. The sense of unspeakable loss that followed went deeper and lasted longer. Only as that too drained from her did she gain the strength to weep.
I’m sorry, Phyltis, Faunus, Nils, everybody, she called into the empty room. You meant so well. I wanted to
